Why we love paying for Trello
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>it’s paid and it won’t disappear overnight.
Thats a gross simplification. Perhaps your company paying for trello, and you blogging about it, makes it a little bit more likely that Trello will stick around and will "succeed". But it certainly does not do much to _guarantee_ that they will hang around for however long you want to use it. Much larger paid-for services have disappeared. The best that they can guarantee you is that they will try to make your data available to you in some form if they ever go away.
No company, or service/facility that a company states will stick around, is guaranteed to stick around. Trawl back through the archives on HN and you'll find tale after tale of (previously) reputable companies backtracking, cancelling projects, going bust etc.
Make sure you always keep hold of your data!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4722056 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721028
What do you mean by this? It sounds like you are suggesting that "how" we keep our systems up and running is required to be the same at all times. Why should people care about "how" we do it, just that it's done? For awhile, we had a second data center in Toronto instead of LA. Trello moved to AWS, so it doesn't need a 'second' data center. I don't think we should be derided because we changed the way we keep our systems up and running.
"Make sure you always keep hold of your data!" - Business Class has a great export function :)
Also, minor point, it's Fog Creek, not Fogcreek.
You used the second data-center to sell FogBugz on Demand to your customers. You didn't tell them that you no longer had it. It went down when the storm hit NY, and there was no backup data centre.
If you change the way you keep up your systems, and keep them up, no one minds. When you don't, people rightly question what you've told them in the past and wonder if what you're telling them now fits into the same categories.
I'm aware you have export functions, thats great. My message was to your customers who need to remember to utilise them. Thats not a dig at your company, its applies to any SaaS providers.
I hope my spelling was correct this time around, apologies if not. FYI, "fog creek" is not capitalised correctly in your HN profile, just letting you know so you can keep the brand in check.
> There will probably be a blog post in a couple of months...
That'll be a "no", then.
Well one could say that in the particular case it might have worked out: They knew about Sandy in advance and had a bit of time until the lights went out. But if it happens unexpected, it's a tough call to make: Keep it running or keep the last data since the last log shipping?
If on the other hand they had gone with Sql mirroring, it's likely that there would have been quite some outage just because of the mirroring: If one of the two data centers went down, the whole system would be down, it's often like that with failover systems
(I'm currently changing the business-class route to redirect you to that card if you don't have access.)
Thanks for the kind words about Trello, we're glad you like it!
This sentiment is great for businesses but often doesn't translate well to consumer apps. However, some companies are great at having consumers pay because they love a product. Evernote CEO Phil Libin said how they want to make the free option almost all-encompassing with a small percentage upgrading to premium because they love the product so much. If a product can get to that point with their users, then that's the holy grail in my opinion (rather than feeling like you have to coerce or "force" your users to pay for something by trickery, manipulation, or harsh constraints).
When you frame like this you have both happy paid and happy free users. I imagine it like doing tourism on a city. You may just walk, doing your own sightseeing, with the free city's touristic brochure in your hands. Or you can look for a paid, professional, touristic sightseeing bus. Tourists don't see it as coercive, or even upselling. They are two different products that you choose between.